Now Things are Happening
'We went to school and somewhere along Alfred Street – I seem to vaguely remember – it dawned on me that Hitler had invaded Holland, Belgium, and at the same time struck at France.  "Well," we thought, "now things are happening." '
     from Rockpools and Daffodils

In 1940, George suffered a personal tragedy too.  His father, John Brown, died suddenly while working on Hoy.  He had suffered crippling arthritis for many years; unable to continue his jobs as postman and tailor he had resorted to other work when the war began.  He was a hut-cleaner for troops stationed at Lyness, Hoy.  His death must have been a terrible blow for George, who was just starting to relate to his father in a more adult fashion, sharing his poetic stirrings.  Mary would not have been quite 50 at this time.

And so George could no longer escape the adult world.  At 18 he had to leave Secondary School and take stock of his future.  Gone the eternal present of his boyhood; an awareness of the future was upon him. 

George and his contemporaries heard the war news on the wireless or read it in the Daily Express.  The 'impregnable' Maginot Line gave them short-lived confidence, as they charted the progress of the German army.  

In Stromness there was a sense of distance from the war, in spite of the troops stationed there. It wasn't long before they discarded their gas masks.  By May 1940, George reports the excitement he and his friends felt, waiting to leave school and join the forces.  The Home Guard was formed and they took turns to stand guard throughout the night at the Telephone Exchange behind the Masonic Hall.  They didn't doubt victory.  

The next year, 1941 held another shock for George.  Pulmonary tuberculosis was diagnosed.  At that time there was no cure, and the prognosis must have seemed terrifying to a young man of 19.  Rest, fresh air and wholesome food plus a series of painful gold injections in the muscle of the upper arm were prescribed.  This treatment was deemed to have good results in some patients.  George spent six months in the sanatorium at Kirkwall.   In his autobiography he records an odd feeling of gratitude to the tubercle inhabiting his lungs, in that it prevented his having to face what he dreaded, the world of getting and spending.  Once he was well enough, he was allowed to leave the sanatorium and wander the streets of Kirkwall.  He came for the first time to St Magnus Cathedral.  It was an intense experience, the beginning of a lifelong passion for all that the building represented.  He thought he would like to be buried there, and though no one will be buried there again, it was in a way prophetic. 

He no longer knew if he had a future, but he assumed the time he had would be passed in a kind of limbo with little or no expectation placed on him.  He was discharged, uncured, knowing the tuberculosis might break out again at any time and be fatal.  He felt little fear of death, and in retrospect wondered if he had been half in love with the idea, not unlike Keats, one of his favourite poets at the time.

He was still rather unwell in August 1943, when he went to spend the summer weeks in a farmhouse in Birsay to recuperate.  The war made its presence felt only by the comings and goings of the RAF camp nearby, otherwise nothing could have been more peaceful.  He gathered mushrooms and read, visited neighbouring farmhouses and experienced much courtesy and kindness.  Each evening, he had a bowl of ale heated on the stove, brewed by the lady of the house.

He describes himself as unemployed and unemployable.  Mary, newly widowed, kept him for two years in food, clothes and cigarettes; smoking at that time was not associated with lung or any other kind of damage.  After that he received the small government allowance paid to tuberculosis sufferers.  At some point he received National Assistance, spending it on books, beer and tobacco.  Mary did everything.  By his own admission, George did nothing to help his mother in the house, and although he thought Stromnessians perceived him to be a layabout or worse, he couldn't object to the truth of the label.    

He wrote a few pieces each week for the Orkney Herald,  and he began to write poetry.  The making of poems was supposedly a hobby, but still he sent a sheaf of them for criticism now and then to his old Latin teacher.  Once, the teacher typed some of them up; George remembers a tremble of joy seeing them for the first time in typescript. 

For George, these few years represent something of the crisis/opportunity beloved by Chinese philosophers.  In common with many Stromnessians, his mother took in lodgers during the war;  one was influential in George's life, bringing opportunity in the midst of crisis.  Francis Scarfe had already published two books of poems as well as a critical study of modern poetry.  George describes the two of them sitting in the evenings at the same table, writing verse, passing the finished work across to each other for comment.  

Scarfe also introduced him to classical music.  George credits Scarfe and this short shared period with giving him the strength of spirit to choose to live. It must also have affirmed his burgeoning writing skill, and perhaps the two are not unrelated.  He began to send poems to a monthly magazine, and the stories, poems and plays were coming steadily. Their friendship endured; they corresponded until Scarfe's death in 1988.  

He discovered the Orkneyinga Saga, and writers like Thomas Mann and Brecht.  The vital ingredients of his future writing were beginning to be assembled. 

In 1944, contrary to earlier expectations about employability, George became Stromness correspondent for the Orkney Herald.  He had a hard task with half the population away in the forces, and black-out at night keeping people indoors, restricting the social life of the town.   A veto on writing about weather conditions or anything connected to the thousands of troops milling around, or the comings and goings of ships, added to his difficulties.  George's solution was to give his imagination free rein about the town and the townsfolk.  Reaction varied from amusement to outrage.  Letters of complaint were sent to the Editor, and worse, George was confronted in the street.  He realised that writing using his imagination might be his true calling, rather than journalism. 

A seemingly casual event in the summer of 1946 set up a theme in George's life.  He was invited to a picnic on Hoy, the cliff girt and craggy island.  Rackwick was a melancholy place with it's ruined crofts, rusting domestic and agricultural implements.  But that day, its beauty hit him.  He returned many times to Rackwick, using the symbolism of the place in what he considered his best stories and poems.  He credited Rackwick with giving the works any quality they might have.    

In 1947 another change came to Stromness – electricity.  The old cruisie lamp had, by the 1920's, given way to the paraffin lamp by the light of which George did his homework, played games or read a comic.  Some of the grander houses, and eventually council houses too, had gas light and gas rings for cooking.  Gas light was diffused through a mantle, fragile and frequently collapsing into flakes at a touch. The gas meter was fed by carefully hoarded pennies. 

Gas street lights in the 1920's and 1930's gave a faint glow of light, the lamplighter going on his rounds at dusk, and again at dawn to douse the flame.  For five or six nights around full moon there was no street lighting, the streets shone silver and seemed full of magic.  Then in the Spring of 1947, electric lamps brought glare instead of glow to the streets.   

George was present when electricity was switched on for the first time in Stromness, in his official capacity as Stomness correspondent for the Orkney Herald.  For such a significant moment, it was a quiet affair in Banks' Cafe in Alfred Street.  

Because Stromness had been 'dry' for some twenty five years, George's generation didn't get it's first taste of beer until 1948 when a bar re-opened in the Stromness Hotel with beer at one shilling and twopence. The legality of it didn't stop the feelings of guilt, or the desire to sidle furtively and without observation up the lane.  Closing time was 4 p.m.  Coming out was in marked contrast to entering; the bravado of ale upon them, they sauntered out heads held high.   

Perhaps the wet canteens of the soldiers during the war helped to bring about this change, perhaps the period after the war was ripe for social change.  George took to what he called the creamy frothy nectar, the beginning of difficulties he writes about movingly in his autobiography.

1949 saw the arrival of another innovation, of less import than electricity or even the ending of the dry season, but still exciting to the people of Stromness.  Shopping Week had arrived.  The town was hung with flags of every nation.  Shops dressed their windows competitively, and there were sports events, a pet show and a baby show.  George's abiding memory appears to concern the celebratory consumption of alcohol. He asks his readers to remember that Stromness had, at that time only one pub.  Hordes of people came by the busload from all over West Mainland, from the South Isles, on the Hoy Ferry, across the Pentland Firth on the St Ola and by air, flights then run by B.E.A.  The one bar was overflowing, literally, with people holding beer glasses all down the close and the street, as far as Alexander Graham's fountain.  George was one of the happy crowd.

Up till then, Stromness supplied everything George needed; it provided the rhythm to his daily life, and the slow steady heart-beat of the community was in tune with his own.  But in the winter of 1950-51, out of boredom, George began to attend an evening class.  The director of adult education asked him if he would consider applying to become a student at Newbattle College, Dalkeith.  The Orkney poet Edwin Muir had been appointed warden when it re-opened after the war.  George could expect a grant of £150.

Fortuitously, Edwin Muir and his wife Willa were due in Stromness in the summer of 1951.  They invited George to tea in the Stromness Hotel.   He was very nervous, and had some beer in the bar to steady himself for the interview.  He needn't have worried.  Each of the Muirs made different impressions on him.  He found Edwin was kind and considerate, and to his amazement,